Monthly Archives: July 2003

Last year, it seemed as if the entire planet revolved around Ozzy Osbourne, and now there’s a scientific explanation (if the Oz were a gargantuan exploding ball of hydrogen, that is). Stars rich in iron, nickel, and other metallic elements … Continue reading →

Poems are duking it out in a Darwinian sense on David Rea’s website. He’s designed a computer program that allows poems to evolve. Starting with 1,000 random words culled from “Hamlet,” “Beowulf,” and the “Iliad,” among others, his program randomly … Continue reading →

Some women just give and give to the men in their lives, never getting anything but the fuzzy end of the lollipop in return. And so do the females of the semi-aquatic insect species known as the Zeus bug. In … Continue reading →

It’s a cliche that people who live in large cities generally talk faster and louder than their rural counterparts. And it looks like city birds also sing differently than their country cousins. In the July 17 Nature, Hans Slabbekoorn and … Continue reading →

Take a deep breath and relax, doom-from-the-sky watchers. Researchers from the United Kingdom and Russia report that stony asteroids slamming into Earth are less of a threat than previously thought. The researchers say that, based on their computer simulations, the … Continue reading →

Forget cheese. It’s chocolate that drives mice wild, and now, it seems, to their deaths. Researchers from the University of Warwick in England, in collaboration with Sorex Ltd., a manufacturer of pest control products in Cheshire, have developed a chocolate-scented … Continue reading →

Don’t tell the children, but Nemo may be a potential transsexual. To ensure harmony in its tight-knit fishy community, it appears that the colorful clownfish can adjust its sex, size, and growth rate, Peter Buston reports in the July 10 … Continue reading →

Wait staff who mimic their customers get bigger tips, Dutch researchers report in the July issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. No, the waitress who imitates her customer’s stutter won’t be raking in the dough, but if she … Continue reading →

It’s bad enough that some scientists are still debating whether Pluto is a planet at all, but now there’s another Plutonian mystery. Completely unexpectedly, Pluto’s thin nitrogen atmosphere has been found to be expanding, researchers report in the July 10 … Continue reading →

In yet another example of how monkeylike humans are (or how humanlike monkeys are), monkeys can link sounds to specific facial expressions, report researchers in the June 26 Nature. Rhesus monkeys communicate using their faces and voices. Among their most … Continue reading →